Austen Riggs Center

We appreciate you raising this, and want to clear up a misunderstanding. The Residents' Conference is not an interdisciplinary clinical conference — it's a targeted educational event for psychiatric residents and residency program directors, addressing curriculum gaps specific to that training context (e.g., psychodynamics of the hospital system and of psychopharmacology). The audience is intentionally narrow: most MDs are excluded as well, not just non-MDs. It's designed to meet a specific training need. Austen Riggs has a robust calendar of virtual live and on-demand programs that welcome clinicians across disciplines and reflect our longstanding commitment to collaborative, humanistic care. They can be found at education.austenriggs.org. We hope to see you at one of those — and we'd welcome the chance to learn more about what you're looking for. Please feel free to reach out directly at education@austenriggs.net.

Very disappointed in @AustenRiggs for excluding all non-MDs in their upcoming Residents’ Conference on Working with Complex, Difficult-to-Treat Patients. The good will so carefully built through Erickson is being tossed in the trash. Insulting.

Join us tonight. For more information and the link to attend, visit austenriggs.org/admission/unde….

Join us tonight to learn about the Riggs treatment approach and if it's a good fit for you, a family member, or your patient. Our staff will be available online to answer your questions. austenriggs.org/admission/unde…

There's still time to register for tomorrow's lecture. education.austenriggs.org/content/workin….

Where does hope come from when the world feels overwhelming? In this piece for Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Riggs staff psychologist Dr. Jennifer Stevens reflects on clinical work, trauma, and the small moments that allow hope to be rediscovered or created. A brief but powerful read: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

How do we transform painful experiences into meaning? In the latest episode of New Books in Psychoanalysis, Riggs team leader/staff psychologist Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP, reflects on trauma, identity formation, and the creative process at the heart of psychoanalytic work. A conversation about listening deeply—to symptoms, stories, and the spaces in between. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mar…

When treatment hasn’t led to sustained progress, what comes next? Free live online session about the Austen Riggs Center’s treatment model. austenriggs.org/admission/unde…

Join Mentalizing Across Contexts, a free virtual conference exploring mentalization from childhood to adulthood. March 20 | 10 AM–4 PM ET | 5.0 CE/CME credits Learn more: Education.AustenRiggs.org/Riggs-Yale-2026

Austen Riggs Director of Research Katie Lewis, PhD, responds to the @TIME article by Scott LoMurray linked below. "Psychoanalytic and developmental writers have long emphasized the importance of upstream interventions, reflected in today’s mental health landscape through community-based interventions like Family Minds (Adkins et al., 2018) and Minding the Baby (Slade et al., 2023), which each promote the importance of secure attachment bonds within families during the earliest years of life as a protective factor against later adversity and distress. Beyond relational supports, LoMurray’s article highlights the importance of taking a multi-pronged approach in creating communities of health and resilience, which must include upstream efforts to address sources of inequality and deprivation, to ensure access to opportunities for learning, advancement, and agency, and to increase feelings of belonging. Throughout the history of Riggs, our patients have taught us that suicide prevention ultimately is not simply about preventing death, but investing in the development of a life imbued with meaning and purpose; this is the key not only to reducing suicide risk, but to building resilience and inspiring growth. LoMurray highlights the important ways that this latter goal has been overlooked in the modern public health funding and advocacy landscape, and he suggests ways to improve efforts towards advancing these efforts in the years to come." time.com/7342277/suicid…

“In this interview, Dr. Prinstein points to the important connections between rising mental health concerns in youth that are related to experiences of social disconnection (including loneliness and social anxiety) and increased reliance on technology, including generative AI resources that often seem to mimic real human interactions. The underlying challenge with these developments, which Dr. Prinstein points out so clearly, is that essential human capacities for managing novelty, nuance, and the unknown – skills that are absolutely essential for navigating a complex and sometimes imperfect world – are under-developed, and contribute to difficulty in learning to rely on the self or to turn to connections with others as a tool for survival and growth. The importance of bolstering the ability to develop both a sense of agency and to recognize the incredible value of our social relationships for promoting overall wellness and stability serves as the bedrock of our treatment model at Riggs, centralized in our residential therapeutic community program but echoed through our clinical treatment program and scholarly and empirical pursuits within the EI.” ~Austen Riggs Director of Research Katie Lewis, PhD

Congratulations to the 2025 Award for Excellence in Psychotherapy recipients! This is a distinguished annual award that celebrates and supports exceptional psychiatric residents who have demonstrated notable interest and aptitude in psychodynamic #psychotherapy or #psychiatry. austenriggs.org/news/riggs-ann…

Meaning, Medications, and Psychodynamic Psychopharmacology: Discussion with David Mintz Exploring medication effects mediated symbolically psychiatrymargins.com/p/meaning-medi…

Happening this Friday!

@maishimadamd yes, there is a live webinar and in-person option for this event

@AustenRiggs Would it be available online?

Riggs is proud to be one of the sponsors of the Annual Yellowbrick Conference: Friday December 5, 2025 conta.cc/3JVV8Mv

Join us for a free lecture tomorrow night with @GilaAshtor. education@austenriggs.org/GilaAshtor-FNGL

David Mintz, MD, examines an often-overlooked dimension of psychiatric care—how the meanings patients attach to medications can profoundly shape their experience of treatment and become a source of harm. austenriggs.org/news/meaning-b…